So why should we all have something that A) the lawful uses of such are exceedingly rare, and B) ends up involved in a lot of unlawful or unintentional killings.
I do not accept this premise. There are many other premises for gun legality.
That said, when I was very young my grandfather had to shoot a number of stray dogs out his car window while driving through a rough pasture because they'd killed a couple calves and were attacking his cows. Some tried to bite the vehicles tires after the first shots. Gun used was a Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle. I didn't witness, but saw pictures, possibly originally taken for insurance purposes.
He was not, under a very strict definition, defending himself. But it still seems very unproblematic to me.
In many ways being adult enough to vote is synonymous with being adult enough to own a gun safely: the ballot box is as capable as any gun of unleashing horrors on the world.
I can't see how there's any way gun education in public high schools or similar wouldn't be drastically cheaper. Not that I think they're options that should be viewed as policy substitutes or alternatives.
The solution is neither to have full time employed 3-4 people every 5 miles, nor to accept multiple hours of response time for someone to drive all the way from the nearest station. Some might think air travel solves it but even that would generally too slow when minutes can be the difference between a managed fire and an out of control fire. Instead what we have is people who get paid to be stand-by and are positioned close enough that if they get a call they will deploy and be at the area within reasonable time, but who otherwise have an regular job like being a farmer. It not optimal but it is distinctly faster compared to the alternative.
This is actually the model used for animal control in rural areas. The person being hired is generally a local hunter (ie, many who are farmers themselves) who gotten some training and hopefully get some compensation when there is call. If a car hits an animal and you need someone to track the wounded animal down, it would most likely be a local hunter.
I am honestly a bit surprised by the attitude in this thread and how this model is not more well known.
(Though in a city I imagine that means things like throwing rocks or using a shovel.)
Surely this is a parody example?
What other premise is there, when we're talking about a device that is designed to seriously injure and kill others? It's either a defensive weapon, or, worse, an offensive one.
I think hunting is a totally legitimate use for a gun. I think your grandfather's case is as well, though there certainly are other solutions to his problem, if more difficult and less efficient ones.
Sure, you might want a gun as a collector, or because you enjoy shooting one at a gun range. But I'm not convinced these "recreational" reasons are good justifications for allowing general ownership of a device designed for its lethality.
You hunt? Fine; get a license for that, and you can own guns made for hunting. You need to a weapon as a part of your job (like your grandfather, perhaps)? Fine; same deal: be licensed and restricted to types of guns appropriate for your job. A gun for fun? No, not fine (let the properly-licensed gun range own and store guns, and you can go and shoot them for fun). A gun for self-defense? I don't think it's clear that use outweighs the downsides of having a heavily-armed populace.
I think the thing that gets me the most is that you can walk into a gun store without having seen our touched a gun in your life, and walk out with a gun (modulo whatever waiting period your locality might require). No training needed, no license needed. Fork over some cash, and here's your deadly projectile weapon and as much ammunition as you want. That's irresponsible.
That said, I don't really get what you think licenses and such accomplish. A gun is 19th century tech that you make in a garage. Anybody who really wants one can make one, all the registration and licensing is mostly a burden on people who are mostly harmless. And it's very post-facto/pre-cog-ish.
Looking at some other comments, and it crossed my mind that this perspective is very urban-centric. If you live in the country, it's pretty safe and cheap to shoot some cans with a .22, but pretty expensive in time (and maybe money) to travel to a range. And it's that way in a way that makes socioeconomic class way more centric to shooting - more like a racket club.
At the same time, arguably concentrating all the shooters in one place might make things less safe: if you do something stupid on your own property with no-one around, there's nobody to get hurt. But if the person next to you at the range is a moron and does something idiotic like shoot at 90 degrees to the firing line trying to check if a round is chambered with their finger on the trigger, doing it at a range is way less safe than doing it in the middle of nowhere.
Now you might argue that people who've been trained won't do stupid things like that, but despite drivers being licensed I still see a lot of stupid on the road and don't really believe that it'd be any different with guns.
I've owned guns for self protection in the same 40+ years and have never needed them for self-protection, but I also haven't needed any of the other above forms of insurance except the last which came in really handy when my apartment was hit by a natural disaster.
I've never heard of a toddler accidentally murdering someone with a fire extinguisher, yet that's an everyday occurrence with guns.
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/marietta-man-arrested-after...
EDIT: I can’t help be curious about what’s in the mind of someone who is so blatantly dishonest. Right at the top it says “Published 2 days ago”, and in the second paragraph it says “Monday”. Is the idea that you assume no one will actually take a look at the link?
My point is that the claim that a toddler kills someone with a gun every day is false.
Overstating the incidence of an event by a factor of 20 means you don’t have a handle on reality. Deliberately lying about news events means you’re not truthful. Putting words in people’s mouths and imparting inhumane motivations to them means you lack respect. All of these things happened in just this handful of comments, and, no, I don‘t think I’m missing anything at all.
You derailed this comment thread by quibbling over the specific frequency of these tragic events, rather than focussing on the point - which was that these accidental killings do indeed happen frequently - perhaps more frequently than you realised.
Seriously, though, maybe this is just a local colloquialism or language barrier thing, but to me, the phrase "everyday occurrence" doesn't mean "something that literally happens every day", it means "something that is common and happens often".
Your method of "extrapolating" is innumerate.
You're getting all mixed up between normative ("should") claims, and descriptive ("is") claims. Is it good that people die by getting tangled in their bedsheets? No. Is it good that a toddler occasionally accidentally shoot someone? No. Should we spend time on either problem? No.
Mostly lies. My mind is just swimming in them, it's hard to think about anything else tbh
Hint: stop digging, admit you're wrong.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/14/peopl...
I guess I can expect a comment now along the lines of “Oh yeah? So 486 deaths a year is OK with you as long as they’re not all toddlers?”
GP said he didn't know anybody who needed to use a gun.
- My wife has used a fire extinguisher
- I have been reimbursed by car insurance
- I have several friends who have been reimbursed by homeowners and renters insurance.
But I too also know more people who've been threatened with lethal force on the streets than have had reason to use fire extinguishers. Doesn't deter me from keeping a big fire extinguisher wherever I live.
1. Where you live. If you live in the suburbs and drive everywhere, there are just very few opportunities for you to get "attacked on the street" as you are hardly ever walking down the street.
2. Disagreement on what situations necessitate a gun. I know a lot of people who think that e.g. robbery is insufficient reason to defend yourself with deadly force.
Similarly I've seen people astonished that someone might choose to defend themselves from an unarmed man with a gun, even when that man is larger and is not allowing them to leave.
As you say, though, just another anecdote.
> I've owned guns for self protection in the same 40+ years and have never needed them for self-protection, but I also haven't needed any of the other above forms of insurance except the last which came in really handy when my apartment was hit by a natural disaster.
So what you're saying is that you don't need your guns, but the insurance did come in handy after all. Got it. I feel like you're making the parent's point for them.
2. We don’t nuke each other all the time either. But “God made man and Colt made ‘em equal”—the gun is an equalizer.
I think people in America think we’re some united hegemony, believing all the same thing. No. We don’t. We all have different views and are pursuing happiness differently. Sometimes this pursuit leads to injury of someone else’s pursuit of happiness. Guns, along with education, give people the means of preventing and give meaningful deterrence to those who would disrupt their rightful pursuit of happiness.
Also, guns in the US are used nearly a million times a year to prevent violence (CDC, https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.htm...)
Finally, regarding unintentional killings: that’s why I said education on guns in necessary. Regarding unlawfulness: you must have your head in the sand to think a criminal isn’t already committed to breaking the law.
Guns for everyone.
Unless you need to clean it and for that you can get help if you're ignorant, you don't need this detailed knowledge. You need to only know how to load and safety clear it, ideally know how to clear a jam, and that if you move any safeties to "Fire" it will fire if you pull the trigger.
As much as people like us are horrified by how little education so many people get about their guns, centuries of ergonomic improvements would seem to allow a tremendous number of them to use them safely and effectively in high stress self-defense situations.
> Unless you need to clean it and for that you can get help if you're ignorant, you don't need this detailed knowledge. You need to only know how to load and safety clear it, ideally know how to clear a jam, and that if you move any safeties to "Fire" it will fire if you pull the trigger.
That is FAR more information than most people have. Even the basic rules of gun safety - never point a gun at something you aren't willing to shoot, treat every firearm as if it's loaded, and keep your booger hook off the bang switch (and outside of the trigger guard entirely) until you're ready to fire - are more than most people know. "How to clear the gun or check the safety" might as well be rocket science.
The "massive increase" is hard to get numbers for due to our culture war, but no one sane doubts it, and there's obvious reasons for it and the last fact which is on more solid ground, the nationwide sweep of "shall issue" or better concealed carry regimes and then add the "troubles" of the 21st Century starting with 9/11. And how many states went "Constitution Carry," we don't need no stinking licences this year? We're up to 21 total per Wikipedia.
See a bunch that just so happened to occur while the gun was "being cleaned," you can even begin that without emptying the chamber so you can work on the barrel.
It's easy enough to get a gun to fire. Hitting the right target requires practice.
This is also biased by big cities that have extinguished their gun culture, NYC in particular. That has grave consequences, shall I say.
Notoriously, Glock pistols don't have a magazine disconnect, and their field strip procedure is to drop the magazine, rack the slide, pull the trigger, then pushing the slide lock to remove it. Skipping one of those steps has put a lot of holes in walls over the last few decades.
It's a gun. It's supposed to be dangerous! Owning a gun without knowing how it works is bad.
I don't know; roller-delayed blowback took me a long time to wrap my head around.
[edit]
Oh wait, I see now it's the burst-fire mode, where it doesn't buffer until after the 3rd round has been fired. I remember seeing that a while back; it is crazy.
I don't see that number on that site. Instead, I see:
> The report Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violenceexternal icon indicates a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year.
That's equivalent to saying we have almost no idea how often guns are used defensively.
But I hesitate to bring that up, because I don’t believe there is ANY moral ambiguity for the use of firearms for sporting purposes. Ambiguity only arises in the face of human conflict.
I will defend the ownership, possession, use and carry of firearms on the specific grounds that they ARE tools with the express purpose of hurting, maiming and killing. The specific justification in the US Constitution for citizen ownership of arming of a militia. I also oppose the use of professional militaries as I believe they are corrupt. Fundamentally professional armies have an incentive misalignment: fight for pay, not, fight for something “virtuous”. Therefore “don’t bite the hand that feeds”.
Moreover, the rights of the first amendment can only ensured by the use of force, ultimately, by those exercising said rights. The first amendment is meaningless without the second.
We can count the rounds fired this year alone probably number great than the whole conflict in Afghanistan, all lawful use, but I want to highlight that a GUN is useful being a GUN, not a hobby tool for target practice. If it’s merely a sporting device, well then you should be happy when they take away the guns as we still have airsoft and crossbows for sporting purposes.
No, we defend firearms for what they are and justify them on that use: Force, or the threat of force.
[1] https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3?term=defensive#15
But it doesn't matter, it's an unalienable right enshrined in the Constitution, "and if it saves just one life...."
The majority of shootings (more than 60%) are suicides; these are both intentional and generally lawful. Evidence suggests that most of the rest (between 20% and 30% of all shootings) are criminal conflict -- a lot of people with criminal records shooting other people with criminal records. Here again, there is a lot more to the story than just owning a gun. Unintentional shootings are fairly unusual, less than 4% of all shooting deaths. This is in part why thinking about guns has to be very different from our thinking when it comes to "safety" issues, like car accidents (95% of traffic deaths are unintentional).
The lawful uses of guns are, in fact, much more common than killings. These include hunting and target practice. Most gun owners will never shoot another person but that doesn't mean they don't use their guns.
I walked away from that with a black eye and stolen phone and laptop, but if a gun had been in play I might not have walked away at all.